New France, Quebec and Kings Daughters
Mayflower and early New England settlers
Irish, Scottish and German

June 7, 2013

Murder in War

On 28 February 1759, Lieutenant Hazen and about fifteen men arrived at Point Sainte-A nne. The well-armed group surrounded the first three houses of the village, perhaps with five soldiers at each house. They took some of the occupants captive, including Joseph Bellefontaine, the 64 year old son of Barthélémy's old friend Gabriel Godin and good friend of Michel Bergeron dit de Nantes. They also captured Joseph's wife, Anne Bergeron, his 26 year-old son Michel and wife Madeleine Guilbault, his daughter Nastasie and her husband Eustache Paré (a ge 25), and four of his grandchildren. The English tied Joseph and Michel Godin to trees and proceeded to slaughter their kin in front of them.

In 1774 Joseph Godin-Bellefontaine himself wrote a long mémoire and detailed the massacre of his family by Lieutenant Hazen and his soldiers. "Every human soul will be, as he, much affected by the horrible massacre of a part of his family, of which they had the harshness of making him a witness, he and his son Michel bound, their hands behind their backs and tied to some trees, they repeated to him over and over that he and all his family had to submit to English domination and to swear an oath of fidelity to their King. He persisted in the perseverance of his refusal, they took their rage to the point of massacring his daughter Nastazie, wife of Eustache Paré, crushing her head with a blow of the butt of a gun, his two children and a son of Michel, and splitting the head of the wife of the latter with a blow of a hatchet. During this barbarous scene, Anne Bergeron, his wife, and Eustache Paré, his son-in-law, each took one of the said Paré's children in their arms and only saved them from the fury of these cruel men by their flight into the woods with that which they had on their bodies , without having time to take old clothing or provisions or papers."